Untitled (Silueta series) 1979

This photograph is part of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, an intimate, embodied performance in which the artist shapes a female form in earth. I like to think about how she may have made it; how she might have felt. It’s a deeply emotional process to use your body to impress on an environment. Carving a shape into the earth using her own body, Mendieta created a powerful convergence between nature and the feminine form. I see an exchange of ideas with other artists like Yves Klein who also made art using the body as a medium. When you choose to make the body present in your work, you bring so much with it; gender, race, sexuality, identity. Ultimately, artists are in an ongoing conversation with each other and the world around them. Mendieta’s work is an invitation to consider how the fleeting ephemerality of the land and the body can speak to something greater than ourselves.